Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Angela ODonnellMarch 01, 2010

I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” Seamus Heaney

 

For years I’ve knelt at your holy wells
and envied the cut of your clean-edged song,
lay down in the bog where dead men dwell,
grieved with ghosts who told their wrongs.

Your consonants cleave my soft palate.
I taste their music and savor it long
past the last line of the taut sonnet,
its rhyming subtle, its accent strong.

And every poem speaks a sacrament,
blood of blessing, bread of the word,
feeding me full in language ancient
as Aran’s rock and St. Kevin’s birds.
English will never be the same.

To make it ours is why you came.

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
15 years 3 months ago

A lovely hommage to St. Seamus.  A lovely "tribute to the source" also as an echo of Robert Frost:


Never again would birds' song be the same;


And to do that to birds was why she came.

Angela O'Donnell
11 years 7 months ago

Thank you, Thomas Eichler, for picking up on the echo of Frost in the concluding couplet.  I take my cue from T.S. Eliot--"Good poets borrow, great poets steal."  Here's to literary thievery!

 

The latest from america

Father Alejandro Moral Antón, prior general of the Augustinian order, spoke on Pope Leo XIV's vacation at Castel Gandolfo.
OSV NewsJuly 08, 2025
This week on “The Spiritual Life,” Father James Martin speaks with Stephen Colbert about his experience of being a “fallen away” Catholic and returning to the faith.
James Martin, S.J.July 08, 2025
Catholics across Texas and the world, including Pope Leo XIV, are offering their prayers and support after deadly flooding struck Texas on July 4.
Each year at this time, near the Fourth of July, we contemplate freedom. But maybe we are also being called to do an extended examination of our own fears.
George Drance, S.J.July 07, 2025